The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Eight of Ten Americans Want to Audit the Fed
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke on Thursday voiced his opposition to legislation calling for regular audits of the Fed’s monetary policies, but 79% of Americans think auditing the Fed is a good idea.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just seven percent (7%) of adults oppose auditing the Federal Reserve and making those results available to the public. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure.
Clinton And Gates: No Deadline On Afghan Withdrawal — We Swear!
Chuck Spinney Sends….
Continue reading “Journal: Withdrawal? We Don't Need No Stinking Withdrawal…”
Alex P. Schmid, one of a handful of trully expert scholars in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and his colleague Rashmi Singh, have created a summary that is devasting on multiple fronts. The “Global War on Terror” or GWOT has lasted longer than World Wars I and II combined; the money expended (the authors do not include the military costs of occupying Afghanistan and Iraq) has been enormous, and in all that time, no one has defined the metrics by which to measure the endeavor. The chapter in included in After the War on Terror: Regional and Multilateral Perspectives on Counter-TerrorismStrategy
See also:
Chuck Spinney Sends….
Last night President Obama crossed the Rubicon and made the Afghan War his war. Will this decision come back to haunt him? Juan Cole argues that this is likely to be the case, because Obama's escalation decision is based on a flawed analogy.
Reasoning by analogy is powerful albeit particularly dangerous form of thinking. A valid analogy can unleash the creative mind to see new connections that were previously not seen, but a false analogy can capture the imagination and cause one to see and believe visions of things as they are not. False analogies are perhaps the most powerful mental engine for taking an otherwise rational decision maker off the cliff. Nevertheless, The courtiers in the Court of Versailles on the Potomac, addicted as they are to snappy sound bytes, love analogies, the more simple minded the snapping sound, the better.
Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan
author of widely read blog Informed Comment explains how Obama has been taken to the cleaners and induced to bet his Presidency by buying into the fatally flawed Beltway Consensus that (1) the Iraq Surge was an unambiguous success and (2) its corollary, namely the analogy to Afghanistan that posits a similar kind of surge will produce a similar “success” in Afghanistan. Cole makes his argument by using the simple technique of describing and comparing likenesses and differences, something Obama and his advisors should have done.
Phi Beta Iota: The Salon story is complemented by the below blog from the same author.
10. The biggest threat of derailment comes from an American public facing 17 percent true unemployment and a collapsing economy who are being told we need to spend an extra $30 billion to fight less than 100 al-Qaeda guys in the mountains of Afghanistan, even after the National Security Adviser admitted that they are not a security threat to the US.
Continue reading “Journal: Flawed Analogies Bush the President?”
Brazil Wins WTO Approval to Sanction U.S. Over Cotton (Update2)
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Brazil won the World Trade Organization’s approval to start retaliating against the U.S. because of subsidies paid to American cotton farmers.
The WTO gave Brazil permission in August to impose $294.7 million in sanctions against U.S. goods — the second-highest amount ever permitted by the Geneva-based trade arbiter — and Brazil’s government earlier this month released a list of 222 products that may be subject to increased duties. The list includes cotton and other agricultural and textile products as well as U.S. exports such as electronics, cosmetics, ketchup, cars, chewing gum, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.
WTO judges found in September 2004 that as much as $4 billion in annual U.S. payments to cotton farmers violated global trade rules by encouraging excess production and driving down world prices. In June 2008, they upheld a finding that the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of the fiber, hadn’t done enough to scrap aid to its cotton producers.
Continue reading “Journal: Brazil Whacks US via WTO on Cotton”
Amidst reports that the Department of Homeland Security is adding 30,000 positions, below are two items on the continued expansion of the surveillance state.
Sprint Provided 8 Million Reports on Customers to Law Enforcement
Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers
Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.
. . . . . . .
I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”
Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online
